Toggle Sidebar
Exhibition: “Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And”
The Brooklyn Museum presents the exibition “Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And,” taking place from March 5 to July 18, 2021, at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, 4th Floor. The description below highlights that “The artist addresses her own experience as a person marked by racial hybridity―her family histories connect the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and the United States―who is nonetheless definitively a Black woman.” O’Grady was born in Massachusetts to Jamaican parents.
Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And is organized by Catherine Morris (Sackler Senior Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum) and writer Aruna D’Souza with Jenée-Daria Strand (Curatorial Assistant, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum).
The Diversity, Inclusion and Racial Equity Committee used its first meeting of the new year to pass a resolution commending the residents of the area formerly known as Colonial Village not only for renouncing the racist covenant that restricted home sales in the neighborhood at its birth but for trying to make it easier for other residents of the commonwealth to do the same. Before passing the resolution, the DIRE Committee acknowledged the harm done by the covenant both as a tool for maintaining white purity in the neighborhood and as an insult to Black people for nearly a century.
Williams College seniors Kate Orringer and Morgan Dauk appeared before the Diversity, Inclusion and Racial Equity Committee to give a presentation based on their work in an Environmental Planning Workshop under professor Sarah Gardner. Committee members Bilal Ansari and Andrew Art served as the clients on their research project, which laid out disturbing historical evidence of injustice in the town and college, including the use of a chapel in the White Oaks neighborhood by the Ku Klux Klan, the slave ownership of college namesake Ephraim Williams and town father Benjamin Simonds and the racist covenants in a town neighborhood that led residents there to take action this summer.